Video Shows Beheading of German by Abu Sayyaf in Philippines

MANILA — In 2008, Jürgen Kantner and his partner were abducted from their sailboat, held for 52 days in Somalia and released after a six-figure ransom was reportedly paid.

Then he went back to Somalia to get his boat.

After three decades sailing the oceans, Mr. Kantner was a German on paper only. “Why should I go back to Germany, where I have nobody to help me?” Mr. Kantner was quoted as saying at the time. “I have no friends back home.”

Despite that ordeal, he and his partner continued to sail in dangerous waters. And on Monday, the Philippine and German governments identified Mr. Kantner, 70, as the man with shaggy white hair and an unkempt beard who was shown being beheaded in a video released by a Philippine militant group, Abu Sayyaf. It had demanded $600,000 in ransom for Mr. Kantner and had set a deadline of Sunday for the two governments to comply.

“We are deeply shaken at this inhuman and horrifying act,” Germany’s foreign ministry said in a statement. “We condemn the murder of this German in the strongest possible terms. There is no justification for such an act.”

Mr. Kantner and his partner, Sabine Merz, were seized in November while sailing in an area of the southern Philippines under the control of Abu Sayyaf. Their 53-foot yacht, the Rockall, was found on Nov. 7 with a dead woman later identified as Ms. Merz, 59, still aboard. News media reports said a spokesman for Abu Sayyaf had accused Ms. Merz of firing on them, and they shot her dead.

In a video circulated this month by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist websites, Mr. Kantner said the Islamist militants would behead him soon if they did not receive a ransom.

The video, which runs for less than two minutes and was posted on various sites affiliated with Abu Sayyaf, showed Mr. Kantner, hogtied and slumped to the ground with a machete-wielding militant behind him. The bearded and disheveled hostage says faintly, “Now they’ll kill me.”

The Philippines denounced the killing. “We grieve as we strongly condemn the barbaric beheading of yet another kidnap victim,” said Jesus Dureza, an adviser to President Rodrigo Duterte. “Up to the last moment, many sectors, including the armed forces of the Philippines, exhausted all efforts to save his life. We all tried our best, but to no avail.”

The German authorities as a rule do not confirm ransom payments, and Mr. Kantner said in a 2008 interview with Stern magazine that he was not allowed to speak of how much had been paid to secure his and Ms. Merz’s release. But at the time, German news media reported it to be the same amount that Abu Sayyaf was seeking.

Mr. Kantner appeared to have been fully aware of the risks he faced in continuing to sail through dangerous waters. He told the newsmagazine Stern months after his release that as long as governments continued to pay ransom, the kidnappings would continue.

But he also felt he could not remain on land. “I bought my first boat at 28,” he said. “All in all, I have lived more than 30 years at sea, have worked on ships and have delivered yachts — that pays well.”

“I lived for 14 years on a sailing boat with my family. Both of my children grew up there,” he added. The whereabouts of Mr. Kantner’s children were not immediately clear on Monday.

At that time, he was already over 60 and knew that he would not be able to find work in Germany. Still, he spent four months back in his home country, trying to get back on his feet financially, he told Yacht magazine in a 2009 interview.

Then a Somali living in Germany reached out and told Mr. Kantner that his boat lay in harbor in the port of Berbera. Bucking warnings from the German authorities about the risks of trying to recover the vessel, Mr. Kantner borrowed money and bought a plane ticket.

“When you live 33 years on a ship and never slept in a bed, only in a berth, then you’re quite attached to your ship,” he said.

He repaired Rockall enough to set sail later that year with Ms. Merz for Aden, Yemen, and then on to Asia, where Mr. Kantner said he had connections that he hoped could provide him with odd jobs.

At the time he said he had considered getting a machine gun to mount on the deck of the boat, but confessed that the idea gave him an “uneasy feeling.”

“We have both said we don’t want to go through that again,” he said of their abduction by the Somalis. “We would rather shoot ourselves.”

Perfecto Yasay Jr., the Philippines foreign minister, said the country would stick to its policy of refusing to pay ransom and seek technological help from its allies to pinpoint remaining hostages.

“We will undertake our operations to make sure we give a premium to saving the lives of the hostages,” he said in Geneva, where he was attending a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. “Our task has not been easy, but we are prepared to crush them when the opportunity comes.”

Although Abu Sayyaf is relatively small, with fewer than 500 members, it has been responsible for some of the Philippines’ worst terrorist attacks, including bombings, killings and the targeting of foreign nationals.

Abu Sayyaf, or Bearers of the Sword, operates in mostly poor areas in the southern islands of Basilan and Sulu. Despite its small size, it has rebuffed countless military offensives and remains a serious threat, often using abductions to raise funds and killing hostages when ransoms are not paid. Last year, the militants beheaded two Canadians and a Filipino it had seized separately.

Mr. Dureza said terrorism had no place in a democratic country. He promised that Mr. Duterte’s government, which has been waging a violent antidrug campaign that has been severely criticized by human rights groups, would “confront violent extremism.”

“A precious life had been needlessly lost,” he said. “There must be a stop to this killing of the innocent and the helpless.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Jürgen Kantner and Sabine Merz were kidnapped by Somali pirates. It was 2008, not 2009.

Correction:

An article on Feb. 28 about the release of a video showing the beheading of a German sailor kidnapped in the Philippines by Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist group, misstated the day that Abu Sayyaf had set as the deadline for the German and Philippine governments to comply with its demand for $600,000 in ransom. The deadline was Sunday, Feb. 26 — not Monday, Feb. 27.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Video Shows Militant Group’s Beheading of German Hostage, Philippines Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe